The internet continues to expand as a source of information gathering and information distribution. Businesses increasingly market, sell, support, and offer information about products to potential customers via the internet. To provide marketing support to businesses, approaches have been developed which provide information about how business' web sites are used. Data corresponding to web site use is then stored in a database, so that the data can later be analyzed. Given the size and frequency with which data updates may be received, the prior approaches for supplying relevant and up-to-date data regarding web site use suffers from serious shortcomings.
One prior approach required customer initiated interactions with a database, or a program user interface providing access to the data within a database, to determine if an updated data was available or needed. That is, a customer would be required to request an update which would in turn initiate a data inspection. From the customer initiated data inspection, if there was an update to data stored in a database, the new data could be supplied. However, such an “on demand” service may not provide relevant and/or timely updates to business and marketing professionals. For example, a website may receive thousands of hits a day on a specific web page devoted to a product. Such activity might imply that there is a rising interest in the product among potential consumers. However, the data corresponding to the potential interest in the product will not be communicated to the marketing professional until the marketing professional initiates a database query. Further, such information may necessitate quick decisions relating to advertising and/or marketing campaigns in order to capitalize on the rising potential interest in the product. If such opportunities are not seized quickly, the opportunities are diminished, or may disappear entirely.
When a website receives hundreds or thousands of hits each day, the data generated and stored in the database can be enormous, amounting to millions of database records. Thus, when a customer initiates a data inspection to determine whether new data is available, queries on the database storing the data are triggered. However, periodically running database queries against millions of records is inefficient and consumes valuable system resources. Furthermore, the queries may operate on data which has not changed in some time, thus wasting processing time of a system by executing unnecessary queries.
Therefore, using the approaches described above, marketing professionals are not afforded a full picture of how their web site are being used.